Introduction to AWS Cloud

In a market full of cloud providers, AWS is one of the best cloud computing platforms available. AWS provides many different cloud services that cater to the needs of various organizations and individuals who want to create, deploy, and manage their applications and services without the need for expensive physical hardware and infrastructure.

Following are some of the critical services as part of AWS offerings:

1. Compute Services:

   • Amazon EC2 (Elastic Compute Cloud): It provides different instance types with resizable compute capacity in the form of virtual machines and allows us to run applications and workloads. AWS provides a 99.99% availability guarantee for all instances. Also, the flexible cost model helps companies avoid upfront commitments.

2. Storage Services:

   • Amazon S3 (Simple Storage Service): It offers scalable object storage suitable for backup, archiving, and data distribution. AWS provides 99.999999999% (11 9’s) of durability guarantee for S3. S3 also includes encryption, regional backups and other data management options out of the box.

   • Amazon EBS (Elastic Block Store): It provides block-level storage that we can attach to EC2 instances. AWS provides a 99.999% durability guarantee. It also provides features like replication within the Availability Zone, etc.

   • Amazon EFS (Elastic File System): It provides a shared file system with fully elastic storage and performance, which grows and shrinks based on several files. AWS provides 99.999999999% (11 9’s) of durability and a 99.99 availability guarantee.

3. Database Services:

   • Amazon RDS (Relational Database Service): It provides fully managed and scalable relational database services like MySQL, PostgreSQL, SQL Server, etc. It also offers high availability with Amazon RDS Multi-AZ deployments.

   • Amazon DynamoDB: It provides a fully managed NoSQL database service suitable for high-performance and scalable applications with single-digit millisecond response time. AWS provides a 99.999% availability guarantee.

4. Networking Services:

   • Amazon VPC (Virtual Private Cloud): It provides an option to create isolated network environments within AWS where we can launch and use other AWS resources and manage their accesses by using security groups.

   • Amazon Route 53: It provides domain name system (DNS) and domain registration services. We can create multiple hosted zones to manage different domains in the same AWS account.

   • Amazon CloudFront: This service allows for the global distribution of content through a content delivery network (CDN), resulting in faster access. Additionally, it offers the ability to run lambda functions on edge locations.

5. Security and Identity Services:

   • AWS IAM (Identity and Access Management): It helps manage user access to different AWS resources. It also provides the option to create or manage users, roles, policies, etc., to provide the minimum set of permissions required for anyone to perform their duties in AWS.

   • Amazon Cognito: It handles user identity and authentication for any mobile or desktop applications. It also supports social and enterprise identity federation out of the box.

   • Amazon Inspector: It continuously scans the applications hosted in EC2 or Lambda functions for the security and compliance of those applications.

6. Management and Monitoring Services:

   • AWS CloudFormation: It provides infrastructure as a code service that automates the provisioning and management of AWS resources.

   • Amazon CloudWatch: It provides monitoring and logging of various metrics and events from more than 70 AWS resources and services. It also provides the option to create different dashboards for better visibility.

   • AWS Systems Manager: It provides a unified interface for managing and configuring resources like an incident manager, parameter store, etc.

7. Serverless Computing:

   • AWS Lambda: It provides a runtime environment for executing code and responding to events without provisioning or managing servers.

   • AWS Fargate: It provides an option through which one can operate containers without the need to handle servers or clusters. It is compatible with both Amazon ECS and Amazon EKS.

8. AI and Machine Learning Services:

   • Amazon SageMaker: It is a managed service for creating and deploying machine learning models.

   • Amazon Rekognition: It provides image and video analysis capabilities on the fly. It helps in content moderation, face recognition, etc.

9. Analytics and Big Data:

   • Amazon Redshift: It is AWS’s data warehousing service for analytics. It can execute complex SQL queries on tons of data to provide essential insights for the business.

   • Amazon EMR (Elastic MapReduce): It processes and analyzes petabyte-scale data using popular frameworks like Hadoop and Spark.

10. Deployment and Application Services:

    • AWS Elastic Beanstalk: It simplifies application deployment by handling infrastructure provisioning.

    • Amazon SNS (Simple Notification Service): It is a service that sends notifications and alerts to different subscribers.

These are just a few of the many AWS offerings. AWS helps businesses to increase scalability, reduce costs, and innovate faster by providing on-demand access to a range of computing resources and tools. It has data centres distributed globally, allowing you to choose the region that best meets your performance and compliance requirements.